The Shutdown and U.S. “Credibility”

The cost of shutting down the federal government, for a few days or even a few weeks, pales in comparison to the damage done to the credibility of the United States abroad — and the credibility of democracy itself.

Warning about the danger of lost “credibility” is a fairly easy thing to do, but it is also very difficult to prove that these warnings have come true. “Credibility” is mostly intangible and immeasurable, which makes it hard to know how much “credibility” has been lost as a result of any particular action or failure to act. It is possible that the current shutdown means that the U.S. will be perceived as less credible when government officials talk about the need for political reform in other countries, but it is more likely that other nations will see the mess here as an easily avoidable political impasse that shouldn’t be imitated. Warnings about lost “credibility” are typically vague, because specific examples of what lost “credibility” mean are usually so implausible that they become self-refuting.

If citizens of other democratic countries are confused or bemused by the spectacle of the shutdown, that suggests that the broader “credibility of democracy” is not at stake, since there are numerous other examples of how democratic governments can and do operate. Other nations won’t look at the U.S. and conclude that representative, democratic government is undesirable, but they might take the recent American experience as an object lesson in what not to do. The trouble here is not so much that the U.S. is in danger of losing “credibility” abroad, but that its legislative branch has reached a point where it cannot function normally when addressing domestic issues.

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18 Responses to The Shutdown and U.S. “Credibility”

For me this mostly shows why Ginsburg was right to say that new nations probably should not look to the US constitution for guidance. Even Syria has not yet experienced a government shutdown, while being in the middle of a devastating civil war. When Belgium was more than 500 days without government, it still paid all bills.

“they might take the recent American experience as an object lesson in what not to do”

Indeed. Read Jonathan Kay at Canada’s National Post on the subject.

As late as two months ago, many commentators were bemoaning the fact that Canadian parliamentarians are “trained seals”. Well, he points out, there are some benefits to seals that do not violently rampage throught the ecosystem, destroying everything in sight. 🙂

This story is purely anecdotal, but it does give me pause on the issue of how the GOP’s actions are seen from abroad. About a year ago, my wife and I were on a riverboat cruise in southern Germany with an assortment of English-speaking folks from around the world. One night we ate dinner with several middle-aged people from Singapore, and one of them told me quite bluntly that the debt ceiling fight had convinced him that our form of government is simply a bad idea and too vulnerable to abuses by foolish people. That’s just one guy’s opinion, of course.

But I noticed that every time I had a meal-time conversation on the boat with someone not from the U.S., these same sorts of issues got brought up (especially with the Obama-Romney race going on at the time). They just couldn’t understand why the GOP (including the Republicans on the boat) hated Obama so intensely.

What Tran said. Presidential democracy is a bad idea. It was adopted by people still used to being ruled by a king, imitating a system which meanwhile has developed to where the monarch has diminished to a sort of bejeweled vermiform appendix.

As usual well stated, but relative to American interest (abstract as it might be) in seeing our flavor of free market oriented liberal democracy flourish, versus less market-friendly forms (e.g. France, not to be stupidly Francophobic), this does impact US street cred.

I do think the US has an interest in being credible in advancing free market friendly democracy and it is terrible to see the Republicans becoming … unhinged reactionary lunatics who bring discredit to sane conservative, liberal democratic and free market friendly political principles. Thank god you guys are giving voice to this. It gives me hope.

The rock bottom treasury yields created by the FED QE is actually a bad thing. It allows the government to continue to pile up debt without much pain in the way of interest payments. Unfortunately, there is but one way for yields to go in a significant way – up. They will go up either because QE is finally ended or even just tapered, or because QE infinity will eventually create inflation. Then there will be no solution. The interest payment will balloon even for the country with the world’s reserve currency. Greece has the EU as a savior. There will be no savior for the US. The politicians can’t or refuse to see it coming. They may believe the Krugman fairy tale that we are recovering, we can grow our way out, and that deficits and debt don’t matter. Neither party wants to make truly significant cuts. They are lemmings headed for the cliff.

We need a grand bargain where EVERYONE suffers to eliminate our deficit.

That includes federal workers (like me), including civilian defense employes. We all should gradually pay a higher percentage of our healthcare premiums, reducing what taxpayers cover for us.

The military must be cut. Try to do it without reducing the size of our forces, weapons r and d and procurement. Instead, close our damn bases in Japan, Korea, Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and stop the draining non-essential, non-defensive wars already.

Medicare must be cut.

Subsidies to corporations through the export-import bank or any other governmental or quasi governmental entity must be cut.

Farm subsidies must be cut.

Social Security must be cut. Let’s Try to do it without reducing payments to current and near-future beneficiaries. Instead, gradually raise the age for full benefits and eliminate benefits for very high-income people.

Federal “law enforcement” agencies like the FBI, and especially the unconstitutional DEA and ATF, must be cut, assuming that the American sheeple will be too afraid to abolish them outright as they should be. Abolish the NSA, both for the savings and for the end of their surveillance of us peaceful American citizens.

The biggies are military, Medicare, Medicaid, Social security, federal employees’ salary/benefits/pensions, and interest on the national debt.

How about, for starters, a 5% reduction in the budget of every governmental entity, including the military, social security administration, HHS, DEA, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc? Just get started and CUT for real already. Err on the side of sparing nothing and nobody.

As W.E.B. Dupree says, anecdotes are not data, but the feeling of everyone I’ve spoken to in the UK over the shutdown demonstrate the thinking Daniel suggests: an utter bemusement in how a country could be run the way the US is currently being run (which is to say: not), and little more.

As an aside, I can help mark out here as well: cross-continental loathing for Romney seemed in my experience to stem from a terrible public persona, his tendency to insult Europe, and the fact he was hoping to become the single most important member of a political party an exceptionally large amount of people in Europe despise – Bush Jr being a principle factor here.

That at least explains why people who didn’t know Romney’s policies too well hated him. The people who did know about his policies, of course, loathed him mainly for his policies. HTH.

Actually it’s a testament to the Federal organ devoted to the demos, the House of Representatives. Plain and simple, these guys who were elected were elected to get rid of things like TARP and Obamacare. If they vote to fund Obamacare, they know they’ll be out in the next election. So the brinkmanship is really with their constituents. These Reps aren’t afraid of the RNC-DNC leadership, nor are they afraid of the MSM, they are afraid of their voters, which is exactly how it should be. So in this sense the House is more the immovable object than the Senate or the President.

@CK If they vote to fund Obamacare, they know they’ll be out in the next election. So the brinkmanship is really with their constituents.

Fair enough. Now how about those Republican Congressmen who hail from non-Tea Party districts … who would join with Democrats to form a majority and pass a “clean resolution” sans Obamacare defund language were it to come to the floor.

Is it right that Boehner should run the House in a way that denies them that opportunity?